"Your 'reality', sir, is lies and balderdash and I'm delighted to say that I have no grasp of it whatsoever."— Karl Friedrich Hieronymus, Freiherr von Münchhausen

Friday Free Game: The Traveler IQ Challenge
Friday, November 30, 2007

For mainly philosophical reasons that I am developing into a separate post, I do not like trivia games very much. I am a big believer in games being self-contained systems of rules, and trivia games rely on knowledge outside of the game system itself. This doesn't mean trivia games aren't fun, but they're a different sort of thing than what I would rightly call a game in the sense that Chess or San Juan is a game.

But the Friday Free Game isn't about philosophical purism. It's about sharing games that are quick to pick up and hard to put down. And while The Traveler IQ Challenge is a kind of trivia game, it's so well done and I had so much fun playing it that I felt compelled to recommend it as this week's game. A big shout-out to Miz Salem-Shadow for sharing the link.

The game presents a map of the world with different colors denoting different countries. The game then asks you the names of various places around the world and asks you to click as close to the exact spot named as possible. Speed and accuracy both count. Sure, you may know that Melbourne is in Australia, but Australia's a big place! Is it on the east coast or the west coast? Guess wrong and it'll cost you points. If you score well enough, you will move on to successively harder levels, asking you to locate such exotic places as Valletta and Rapa Nui.

This is the kind of game that anyone at all can enjoy. On my second game, the game informed me that I had, in fact, "Kicked Butt!" See if you can beat my score of 289,836. Enjoy!

The Red Bull Diary is the personal pulpit and intellectual dumping-ground for its author, an amateur game designer, professional programmer, political centrist and incurable skeptic. The Red Bull Diary is gaming, game design, politics, development, geek culture, and other such nonsense.